ng forward."

"But I don't understand.'

"We'll finish the sandwiches, and melt some snow for water, and then
mount. Look--see those two Indian ponies fastened to the tongue of the
stage? They'll carry us to the next station like the wind."

She stared from the window, bewildered.

"I don't know any more about them than you," he answered her thoughts.
"But there they are and here we are." He said nothing about the bodies
evidently carried away by those who had brought the ponies. "It's all
a mystery--a mystery of the plains. I haven't unraveled the very first
thread of--it. What's the use? The western way is to take what comes,
isn't it, whether northers or ponies? There's a much bigger mystery
than all that filling my mind."

"What is that?"

"You."

She bent over the sandwich with heightened color. "Poor Brick!" she
murmured as if to divert his thoughts. But his sympathy just then was
not for Brick.

"Lahoma, you said that this is a subject a man should bring up."

She looked at him brightly, still flushing. "Well?"

"I'm bringing it up, Lahoma."

"But we must be planning to save Brick from arrest."

"I'm hoping we'll get home in time--note that I say HOME, Lahoma. I
refer to the cove. I'm hoping we'll reach home in time to forestall
Red Kimball. We've lost a great deal of time, but Brick doubtless is
safely hiding. And when we get to the journey's end--Lahoma, do you
know what naturally comes at the journey's end?"

"A marriage."

"I thought that was what you meant."

"Will you marry me at the journey's end?"

Lahoma turned very red and laid down the sandwich. Then she laughed.
Then she started up. "Let's get on the ponies!" she cried.

CHAPTER XXII

JOURNEY'S END

The snow, that morning, lay in drifts from five to eight inches across
the trail, and to the height of several feet up against those rock
walls raising, as on vast artificial tables, the higher stretches of
the Kiowa country. But by noon the plain was scarcely streaked with
white and when the sun set there was nothing to suggest that a
snowflake had ever fallen in that sand-strewn world. The interminable
reaches, broken only by the level uplands marked from the plain by
their perpendicular walls, and the Wichita Mountains, as faint and
unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the
sky--these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the
traveler with a sense of his insignificance. Th